Manual Versioning of Risks with SoftComply Risk Manager

By Marion on 24 Aug 2018

For tracking changes in risk management over time you might want to have versioning of your risk management table and risk reports. In other words, you may want to take a snapshot of the current status of your risks for an audit, archive that status and continue managing these risks in real time. Below is a detailed description about how you could do that with SoftComply Risk Manager add-on for Jira.

Couple of prerequisites first, before we get into the description of the detailed process for manual versioning with SoftComply Risk Manager, to better explain how manual versioning in SoftComply Risk Manager works.

First, you should be aware that the risks visible in your risk management table view in SoftComply Risk Manager are only risks that have “Unresolved” Resolution status. If you delete a row in the table, then the risk/Jira issue will not actually be deleted. It remains there with “Resolved” resolution status. This kind of filtering allows you to make snapshots of your risks over time, i.e. to clone risks and change their status to “Resolved”. In other words, you will be able to see your original risks in the Risk Manager table view while also keeping all the risks/Jira issues, including the ones that do not appear on the Risk Manager reports or table/matrix views, in the same risk project.

Another prerequisite for manual versioning of risks is “bulk change” availability in your Jira instance. It is time-consuming to clone and change the resolution of Jira issues (Risks) one at the time. Since bulk editing feature can be disabled by your Jira administrator make sure that you can make bulk changes. To see if you can use the feature, simply make a search with more than 1 risk result and see if you have the option on top right corner that would look like this:

To help you bulk clone the issues for making snapshots of versions over time, you may want to use add-ons that have been developed for that purpose. Manually cloning issues may be a bit of a nuisance, which is why you could use add-ons like Basic Bulk Clone for Jira.

Now, the detailed process how to create manual versions out of your risks in SoftComply Risk Manager:

1. Search for all the issues you want to take a snapshot in Jira. Typically you would have a search query something like that: “All issues from my risk project that are not resolved”. In Jira query language it would be: “project = PRKEY AND resolution = Unresolved”. NB! If you choose all issues, you will have the deleted risks and all previous snapshots in your results as well.

2. Save the filter to allow “Bulk Clone” these issues.

3. “Bulk Clone” all those issues. Make sure you separate those issues from your original ones – the add-ons often propose adding a certain label to differentiate the issues. Bulk cloning will then copy this label to the entire issue set, thus you have a snapshot of your risks after cloning all the issues.

You can use version number as your label, allowing you to search and find those issues by your version number later on:

4. If you chose to Label your cloned issues with something other than your version number, you can now “Bulk change” all the issues you just cloned. Do “Bulk Edit” and label those issues with your version number, i.e add a new label to all those issues. This allows you to search and find those issues by your version number later on.

If you already used version number in your “Bulk Clone” you can skip this step.

“Bulk Edit” the issues you just cloned:

Add your version number as a new Label to the existing one that you set during “Bulk Clone”:

5. Test your label. Search for all those issues in the project with this specific label. Your test result should contain only the cloned issues with the proper label.

Following is a search for all issues with Label V0.1:

6. Now bulk change the resolution of those cloned issues. This will not show them in your risk reports and risk table afterwards. To do that, use bulk change and select “Transition Issues” option. By default we use workflow that has 2 states “TODO” and “DONE”. By transitioning issue to DONE we set Resolution value. Thus if you use out of the box configuration, move the issue to “DONE” status and you are all set. If you have customized the workflow, make sure you are moving the issues to the state that also applies to Resolution.

7. If you have cloned your risks i.e. made a snapshot, also labelled those issues with your version number. You can use that number in the documents you exported i.e. add this version number to the risk management report, plan and risk table exports.

By doing so, you will have created a manual snapshot of your risks and exported the documents with the same version number.